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dkirschner's Anomaly: Warzone Earth (PC)
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| [March 27, 2013 10:44:17 AM]
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Interesting idea for a tower defense game! It's actually more like tower offense. While innovating in this way, I found the game lacking in the excitement department. Also the camera refuses to leave the Commander unit. It hits like rubber walls far before the edge of the screen and bounces back toward the center. I didn't care for the camera.
The story is negligible. A comet crashed to Earth and you've got to go explore and find out what's in this weird dome that formed around it. So, in normal tower defense, you would probably be defending the dome, but in this game, the enemies (mechanical...aliens maybe?) are defending. They set up towers and there are predetermined paths. You play the attacker role and walk down the pathways trying to kill the towers.
There are x number of locations in the game because the comet exploded into smaller pieces. I played through Baghdad and some of Tokyo. So far I've seen 5/6 enemy tower types, gotten 4/6 units and 3/4 special abilities. None of these are any different than what you've seen in other tower defense games. There are laser towers and beam towers and AoE towers and lightning towers. Your units are small tanks, big tanks, mobile missile launchers, and shield generators. Your abilities are repair (heals units), smoke screen (units take less or no damage), decoy (this one was neat - toss it on the ground and towers fire at it while your units walk by), and air strike (which I didn't get yet, but is what it sounds like.) Oh, and you control The Commander, who can walk all over the battlefield and doesn't have to stay on paths. This is useful because you use abilities based on where you are, so you can walk to the back of enemy towers and drop a decoy so they turn around and fire. You also need pick-ups to use special abilities, and friendly airplanes come and drop them all the time, so you need to run around picking them up.
What else...is there anything else to it? Oh yeah, regarding the paths, the paths are laid out, but you essentially can play switchman and toggle which direction you go at crossroads, so you can sorta plan your way around. You also get some customizability in building your squad. You can have up to 6 units at any given time, they are all upgradeable with money gotten from killing towers and collecting some valuable ore, and, this is the cool part, you can switch your units' order around any time. So if the one in front is taking a pounding, hit space bar to go to the strategic map (where you can also change your route at any time) and move that unit to the back to protect it. There are a couple different survival modes that let you play more. Unfortunately I couldn't have a freely unlocked 'free play' mode though. I just wanted to hurry up and see all the units and towers and play with them, but the game drags. Units move slowly, levels aren't particularly short, and after like 3 hours, I was still missing all those units/towers/abilities I enumerated above (in what I read is roughly a 7-hour game). I've played a ton of tower defense games. I want my toys and I want them quickly!
Anyway, I got this because GOG.com had some 5 games for $10 deal and there were 2 or 3 I actually wanted on offer, and this looked interesting as one of the spares, so I didn't lose anything to try it. Neat concept, strategic map and unit building/upgrading were very slick. At the end of the day though, I have better tower defense games that I enjoy more and even have unplayed DLC for. So shelving Anomaly.
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dkirschner's Anomaly: Warzone Earth (PC)
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Current Status: Stopped playing - Something better came along
GameLog started on: Wednesday 27 March, 2013
GameLog closed on: Wednesday 27 March, 2013 |
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This is the only GameLog for Anomaly: Warzone Earth. |
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